SAEDNEWS: United States President Donald Trump had ordered the deployment of F-35 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico amid a report he is weighing options for strikes targeting drug cartels operating inside Venezuela.
American broadcaster CNN, citing multiple sources, reported on Friday that the Trump administration is considering attacks on drug trafficking groups inside Venezuela, which would mark a dramatic escalation in already surging tensions between Washington and Caracas.
Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro called on Friday for the US to “abandon its plan of violent regime change in Venezuela and in all of Latin America”.
The US should “respect sovereignty, the right to peace, to independence,” Maduro said.
“I respect Trump. None of the differences we’ve had can lead to a military conflict,” he said.
“Venezuela has always been willing to converse, to dialogue.”
Maduro has mobilised Venezuela’s military, which numbers about 340,000 soldiers, amid weeks of US threats, and reservists and militia members, which he claimed exceed eight million.
“If Venezuela were attacked, it would immediately enter a period of armed struggle,” Maduro told reporters earlier this week.
Trump said on Friday that the US was “not talking” about regime change in Venezuela.
“But we are talking about the fact that you had an election which was a very strange election, to put it mildly,” Trump said, referring to Maduro’s return to office in January following claims of vote irregularities in the country’s presidential election.
The reported deployment of F-35 warplanes comes on top of a US naval build-up in the southern Caribbean, where American warships and a large number of Marines, as well as a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, have been deployed just outside Venezuelan territorial waters.
